East Cape Stand Up Paddle Fishing by Calvin Tom

Calvin Tom runs Board Fisher a website specialising in gear if you want to get into the water on your stand up paddle board and catch some fish. This has me really interested and I asked Calvin if he could tell us about SUP fishing, he sent through a great story and some pictures from his trip to Baja California.

When Chris called and said he had cheap tickets to the East Cape, Baja California and wanted to know if I was interested in doing some SUP fishing it was a done deal before the conversation ended. The East Cape is noted for game fishing, but we wondered what we could get just fishing off of our SUPs.

Our trip started out of the San Diego airport, we packed our sups, poles, and paddle in board bags, a $50 one way fee each, and were off. We were headed to Rancho Leonero, just south of Los Bareles, about a one hour drive north of the airport. When we reached km 133 we headed off the paved road to Rancho Leonero.

This was a short trip from a Tuesday to Saturday, that gave us a solid 3 days of fishing. Since this was my first trip fishing the East Cape I didn’t know what to expect. As things would have it, the winds were blowing so hard from a low up north that we couldn’t fish for the first two days. All we were able to do was hunker down and wait it out. While waiting it out, we met a few other people who were down there to fish, during dinner and after a few drinks, when they asked what boat we were going out on, we ended up explaining and laughing a lot about SUP fishing, our new friends were from South Dakota, and Alaska, you can imaging their thoughts, a couple of crazy’s fishing from surfboards, they had never heard of a SUP.

The second evening, around 3am we couldn’t hear the winds, the howling winds had finally stopped, as the sun came up we were on the water, unreal. With this being a new place, and having had two days of wind we were lucky to be able to catch anything because we were so hyper. We tied on crocks, fish traps, irons, butterflies and were getting bit off, sometimes we only felt a little nudge and our lures would be gone. But, the bite was on! That day we landed sierra’s, and other fish we didn’t even recognize, all in the 3 to 5 lb range. Our fishing was close to shore, up to 1000 yds from the beach right off the restaurant in front of the resort. Then, around 10:00 am I started throwing a white surface iron, this Rooster fish hit the lure with a passion and I was off for a hundred yard tow ride.

Here are a few pictures of our trip, we met some great people at the Ranch, had the cook broil the sierras with garlic and butter for everyone, did catch and release, drank a little, and impressed everyone with SUP fishing… fun.